Railroad track rails are made of a high carbon steel which makes the tracks more brittle than many other types of steel, such as used in I-beams and columns in building structures. Such track rails can be torn up and reclaimed when a section of railroad track is abandoned, but in order to conveniently handle such tracks, they must be reduced in size to lengths that are manageable to be easily hauled. Accordingly, the long lengths of rail must be reduced in size to four to six foot lengths or other reasonably short lengths so that they can be easily picked up by grapples and other types of machinery and loaded into railroad cars or trucks, or other hauling and handling facilities.
There have been prior devices for breaking rails into shorter lengths and in some instances such devices have been intended to be attached to the boom structure of a hydraulic excavator. For instance, U.S. Pat. No. 4,720,032 discloses such a portable rail breaker capable of holding a rail, producing a notch or nick in one side of the rail and then breaking off a length of the rail over a fulcrum; but the rail breaker disclosed in the patent makes the handling of the rail cumbersome at best. Another device is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,439,921 which comprises a rail breaking attachment for backhoes. Again, this device makes the handling of rails extremely cumbersome, and it appears that operation of the device creates substantial safety problems due to the flying of broken rail parts.
Other rail breakers are illustrated in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,522,323; 4,346,828; and 4,444,345. All of these disclosures facilitate handling the rail by simply sliding the rail along its length, but without any other efficient means of manipulating the rail. Each of the foregoing three patents operate by producing a nick or a notch in the rail and then breaking off the rail at the notch produced. Similarly, the rail lifting and cutting machine in U.S. Pat. No. 4,383,630 receives the rail by sliding and then simply breaks the rail over a fulcrum, and without nicking the rail.
Other patents which disclose nicking a rail and then breaking it are three Russion patents, SU-602-320; SU-941-027; and SU-831-430. U.S. Pat. No. 344,735 discloses the process of nicking the rail in a longitudinal direction so as to facilitate breaking the head away from the base.
Other marginally relevant patents relating generally to performing functions with track rails are U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,430,916; 2,309,262; and 3,680,486; 3,802,731; 4,519,135; and 4,558,515.